PAUL FREEDMAN: Good morning. Questions or problems? So today, this week, we
begin to talk more seriously about religion. And I remind you, we're talking
about Christianity in particular not because of its
spiritual teachings, exactly, but we're interested in the
Church as a power and as a power dealing with, allied
to, but different from the Roman Empire. Everything changes with the
conversion of Constantine. The Church becomes first
tolerated, then official, and then finally the sole legal
religion, except for Judaism, by order of the Emperor
Theodosius the Great in 393. On the other hand, in order to
understand the Church as a power or the politics of this
period, we do have to understand the doctrine,
because people fought over doctrine. And as you've seen in the Jones
reading, they invoked the emperor's intervention. This is not a question as might
be what you would expect today of a religion split about
various problems of dogma solving those problems
itself or splitting off into two factions. The questions over the
relationship between the persons of the Trinity,
Arianism, or the nature of priestly office, Donatism,
provoked right from the year of Constantine's conversion,
312, divisive fights. And they're only the first.
I urge you to have fun with heresies. Heresies are neat. Professor Carlos Eire
is teaching a freshman seminar, I believe. Is it not called "Basic
Heresies." What is it? STUDENT: "Essential Heresies." PROFESSOR: "Essential
Heresies." Yes, even better. And I don't know of any quiz
shows where you can demonstrate expertise on this,
but there ought to be. Or there ought to be sites on
the Internet where you can get a perfect score. We're only touching the surface,
the proverbial tip of the iceberg, to use a cliche. There are lots of heresies. There's a lot of division
in the church. Why not just say, "Hey, you
believe that the Father is superior to the Son, and I
believe that they're coequal. So what?" That's so 2011. Or actually, it's so 2000. Because we ought to be used to
religious doctrines having military or other kinds
of violent effects. So I'm not going to have to
justify for you the fact that we're spending some time
on religion, I hope. But if you do want me to,
just remind me what the rationale is. If your roommates are bothering
you because you're quizzing them about the relation
between the persons of the Trinity, have them
email me or set up an appointment, and I'll explain
why it's important. I'd be glad to do this
as a public service. Or my Facebook page, whatever. This is a situation created
by Constantine. We've seen Constantine's fairly
long reign transform the Roman Empire. We emphasized the creation of
the city of Constantinople as a second capital and the favor
shown towards the church, so that when Constantine died
in 337, 40%, 50%, a large percentage of the Empire's
population was Christian. When he died, the Roman Empire
seemed to have been restored to its former glory. That chapter that begins the
reading for today in Brown's World of Late Antiquity is
entitled, "A World Restored." And he emphasizes this because,
traditionally, historians saw the fourth
century through the lens of the sack of Rome in 410 as
a period of decline. In 410, as we will discuss next
week, the city of Rome was pillaged and partly burned
by the Visigoths, a-- I hate to use the word "tribe," but don't tell anybody-- tribe of barbarians who had
entered the Empire across the Danube and the Balkans. This was a cataclysmic event,
and it ushered in successive crises in the Western
Empire that would lead to its collapse. This weakness of the Western
Empire is partly military, partly political, and partly
internal, a result of weaknesses, of instability,
culture, and the economy. It's always hard to say why
empires fall in some absolute sense, even though we can see
in retrospect the signs of their decline. One of the signs Brown talks
about in the reading for today fairly extensively, and that
is the inequality among the rich and poor grows. On the other hand, this is a
period of inequality, but also social mobility. There are a lot of paths open
to barbarians, even. In this period, barbarians
become important figures in the Roman army. And indeed, the army is a path
of upward social mobility, a very important one. In general, as I've said,
between 337 and 410, between the death of Constantine and the
sack of Rome, people did not see themselves as living
in a period of decline. They did see themselves as
living in a period of real change, the most dramatic of
which was the movement towards Christianity. And the most dramatic example of
that movement is the reign of the Emperor Julian. I've given you a handout
that shows the emperors of this period. Notice that some of them reign
in the East, some in the West, and then some usually briefly
reunify the empire. We're in a transitional period
ushered in by Diocletian when the Empire is sometimes divided
and sometimes not. With the death of Theodosius in
395, the third-to-last of those emperors on the list, he
had been sole emperor for three years. With his death and the division
of the Empire between his son Honorius, ruling
from Ravenna-- the Western capital now, in
what's now northern Italy-- and Arcadius, ruling from
Constantinople, from that point on, we can really speak
of two different emperors. And almost always, there were
two emperors until the collapse of the Western Empire
in the late fifth century. Questions at this point? So the reign of Julian
the Apostate-- "Apostate" because he was born
as a Christian and tried to restore the traditional
Roman religion-- 360 to 363. His failure shows the weakness
of what we can call paganism or traditional Roman religion. By this time, Christianity
was too big to roll back. Julian tried. He tried to reestablish
the temples. He tried to reestablish
the vigor of the cults of the gods. He was an eclectic worshiper of
many different gods, but he also was a philosopher. He is a wonderful, if
sad, example of an intellectual in power. Very few of these emperors
were what would be called intellectual in the sense-- many of them were cultivated,
they liked the equivalent of classical music and art. But Marcus Aurelius is a
philosopher, and Julian at least is a would-be
philosopher. He had a beard. He studied in Athens. He was very unsuccessful,
though. People did not follow
his doctrines. He was a very good
military leader. His troops, when he was on the
Rhine frontier in what's now France and Germany, were
extremely loyal to him. But as emperor, not only did
the church oppose him, but many of his own followers did. He died in an unsuccessful
campaign against the Persians of perhaps murdered-- unclear. But with his defeat, the end of
civic polytheism, of that traditional urban, upper-class
worship of the Olympian gods was in permanent eclipse. The decree of the Emperor
Theodosius that I referred to already of 393 proclaiming
Christianity the only legal religion, except for a small
space allowed for Judaism, did not really mean that everybody
in the Empire was a practicing Christian. The two groups [correction: most
significant group] that would be outside of that
definition are the people of the countryside, a very large
number of people who would either continue their
traditional polytheistic local worship of local gods or
assimilate that worship to Christianity. We're going to be talking
a lot about saints in a couple of weeks.. On some obvious level, which I
don't want to exaggerate but which is nevertheless
there, the saints-- and there are many of them-- they are holy figures. They're not gods,
but they're more powerful than human beings. The saints are a kind of
substitute for polytheism. We'll talk about why
and how that works. The other class that tended to
resist Christianity to the last was the very upper
stratum of the Roman senatorial elite-- the people who were the most
cultivated adherents of the traditional religion-- and philosophers, people who
followed Plato, for example, known as the Platonists. And we're going to come to them,
because they're very important for Augustine's
Confessions. Constantine was succeeded
by his sons. After two of the sons died,
Constantius is ruled alone. Constantius assured that he
would rule alone by massacring most of his family. Julian was one of only two that
he allowed to survive, and he shouldn't have, because
Julian overthrew him. This is brass-knuckle
politics, I guess. The chief preoccupations of
these rulers of the fourth century were the same as when
we started out: the Persian threat on the eastern frontier,
the barbarian threat on the Rhine-Danube frontier. But there are also other
problems that the third-century emperors had not
faced, and these are religious problems. They are,
in particular, Arianism and Donatism. And we've seen a little bit
about these from the reading about Constantine for the
first assignment, but let's go over this. Arianism. Please remember that with
a "y," this takes on a completely different meaning. Aryan is this discredited racial
theory identified, but not invented by, Nazism. Arian with an "i" is a
follower of Arius. Arius was a priest from
Alexandria influenced by ideas from Plato about the absolute
and unknowable nature of God. Any religion, but Christianity
in particular, has a problem: If you make God too absolute and
unapproachable, then why does he care about us? If you make Him too
approachable, then how is he powerful enough to transcend
the world? Platonism-- that is, the philosophy of
followers of Plato-- emphasizes the absolute,
emphasizes the inferiority of what we can understand with
our eyes, with our other senses, and the superiority
of the spiritual. The reason the spiritual is
superior to the material in Platonism and in Buddhism and in
many other philosophies is that the material is mortal,
rots, dies, passes away. The problem for many people, not
just people in the modern world, is that the material is
right here, and the spiritual is hard to apprehend or prove. But most people who think about
it most of the time in history agree that the spiritual
is superior, because it is immortal. Therefore, those who emphasize
the spiritual emphasize this kind of unknowability,
the mystery, the not-easy-to-apprehend-ness
of the supernatural. For Platonists and for Arians,
God was placed infinitely high above us. Now, Christianity has as its
great strength, in many respects-- just speaking
of the power of ideas-- the fact that God becomes man. Christ is incarnated; that
means he becomes flesh. This is not a common
religious idea. Mohammed is not God. He is a messenger. In Judaism, there are prophets,
but they are not made of the same substance
as God. There are religions in which
a holy man becomes supernatural-- a lot of religions
of the East. But in Christianity,
Christ is God. God is manifested
in three forms-- the Trinity-- the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. Arianism says that Christ is essentially different
from God the Father in some fundamental way, that
Christ was created by God as a way of interacting
with the world. If you have studied Plato or
were in DS and remember some of those key concepts, in
Platonism, there's the One, and then there's the Demiurge. The Demiurge is this
hard-working guy or hardworking force, whatever
you want to call it, who interacts between the divine
and the material. He's divine, all right,
but he creates things. He's the one who is out there
creating the spirit as well as matter, creating the world and
the universe, indeed, as we know it, while the
One is at rest. So similarly in Arianism,
Christ is the one who's intervening on Earth, indeed, sacrificing Himself for
humanity. God the Father remains
in heaven. This is not what Christianity
most of the time teaches. Christianity or the Orthodox
or Catholic view is that Christ and God are of
the same substance. The Arians therefore are
subordinationists. They subordinate
Christ to God. A convenient way of remembering
them is their tagline: "There was a time when
Christ was not." It's a supernatural, metaphysical time,
but God made Christ. This goes against the creed
enacted at Nicaea, which to this day is the standard
confession of faith of Christian denominations. The Nicene Creed, as it is
known, says that all persons of the Trinity are eternal,
co-eternal. God did not create Christ. Now, Arianism appealed to people
partly because they worried about the Trinity. The Trinity could be denounced
by anti-Christians as actually three gods. How could God be both
one and three? Also, people who worried about
the physicality of Christ-- Christ becomes flesh,
dies, suffers-- how can God be God if
he dies and suffers? Arianism, you have to take
seriously as something that is not just troubling the
intellectuals. It is not just something for
people with a lot of time and leisure on their hands. It's not for philosophy
majors. It's not even for religious
studies majors. It's not even for the Roman equivalent of college graduates. The barbarians-- and I deliberately avoid
calling them the German barbarians-- but the first barbarians to
convert to this religion were more or less-- and as time goes, on historians
emphasize less-- but more or less Germanic
tribes. The missionaries who converted
them were Arians in the mid-fourth century, which is the
high tide of Arianism in the Roman Empire. When the German tribes or the
barbarian tribes entered the Empire beginning in the 370s,
Arianism was all but over within the Empire. The Council of Nicaea in the
320s and the Council of Constantinople in 381 pretty
much defined Arianism as a heresy, and by 381, it was
on the run in the Empire. But ironically, the new rulers
of the West would be mostly Arians well into the
fifth and, in some cases, sixth centuries. Donatism, or the Donatists. The Donatists-- here we're not dealing with
doctrine or metaphysical questions of the relationship of
the persons of the Trinity. We're dealing with the nature
of the priesthood, hence the nature of the church. It's a question of the
office or the man. If it turns out that I do not
have a Ph.D. from the University of California,
Berkeley, or indeed that I am an impostor, that somehow I
tricked the Yale computer, have been showing up here,
teaching History 210, and am just some random guy-- like the guy who is obsessed
with the New York City transit and has gotten various passes to
get in to drive trains and maintenance yards and stuff like
that-- if I turn out to be like that, you will
nevertheless get credit for this course, I assure you. Because Yale, as an official
body, is the one who grants your degree, gives you credits,
and they were responsible for hiring me. So if I've imposed a
fraud on them, you nevertheless receive credit. You don't have to do a
background search of me. You don't have to find out about
how many pets I have or my credit status or my mortgage,
because you rely on Yale to do that. Think of this then in terms
of the priesthood. If it turns out that the priest
is not a nice guy-- and alas, that happens-- or a sinner-- or what the Donatists really
cared about was he had buckled under threat of torture or the
reality of torture during the persecution of Diocletian and
had, say, burned the scripture or renounced Christianity-- if your priest is bad, is
your baby baptized? That's what Donatism is about,
and Donatism answers, no. No. It depends on the virtue
of the officiate. You can't have a priest
who was what they called a traditor. Traditor is an interesting Latin
word, T-R-A-D-I-T-O-R, because it means both
"tradition"-- or is the root of the word
"tradition," but also of "traitor." It's the handing
down or handing over of something, the giving
up of something. So one can speak of the
handing down of-- our family has cranberry sauce
with slivered almonds, that's our tradition-- or handing over state secrets,
military strategy, or the scripture to the authorities. The Donatists accused priests
who had or they believed had capitulated to Roman
persecutorial pressure in the last years of Diocletian. They branded them as traitors,
and they said that they could not perform legitimate
sacraments. Therefore you, in North Africa,
where the Donatists were strong, you as an ordinary
Christian had better do a background check on your
priest, because your marriage is illegitimate, your baby is
going to hell, your whole participation in the church
is, as it were, short-circuited by
this defect. Worse than that, supposing your
priest is just fine-- in fact, supposing it's 330 AD
and your priest wasn't even born during the reign of
Diocletian, but the guy who consecrated him, the bishop
who anointed him was a traditor, or maybe that bishop
was not, but he was anointed-- it's like Christmas tree lights,
at least the Christmas tree lights that I have,
the analog ones. They're little bulbs, and if
one of them goes, the whole string goes. If one is defective-- the proverbial bad apple rotting
out the entire barrel. But the problem with that is
that you can't organize a church on that basis, you can't
organize a body spread from one corner of the world to
another, unless you believe that the church will guarantee
the sanctity of the individual minister. The office, the fact that the
guy is a priest, has to be more important than the man,
or else you can only have local communities. You can only trust, if you're a
Donatist, somebody you grew up with and a community stable
enough where you're confident of the ancestry. Donatism lends itself to what we
call "sectarianism." A sect is a small, tightly
cohesive group. It does not lend itself
to a church that is universal, big, massive. And it also doubts that the
church itself has the power to overcome the defects
of its members. Now, Manicheans are not exactly
a heresy, but they appear in the Confessions, and
they're very important. So since we're doing doctrinal
ideas, Manicheanism is a teaching about good and evil
that can be applied to other religions besides
Christianity. Manicheanism basically
says that good and evil have a real existence. There is a war in the universe
between a good god and an evil one. And this may be applied outside
of Christianity or within Christianity. And within Christianity, the
evil god is the devil, or according to the Manicheans of
this period that Augustine for a while joined, the god
of the Old Testament. Jehovah is the evil god, and the
god of the New Testament, the Christian god,
is the good one. Jehovah is the one who smites
a lot of people. Jehovah is the creator god,
because the Manicheans believed that matter is evil
and is the source of evil. Spirit is good. The Christian god
created spirit. Human beings are imprisoned in
the body, and they have to figure out a way to liberate
themselves from the dominion of the evil god. Vegetarianism, for a start,
avoiding flesh. But salvation means casting
off the flesh. How is this different
from Christianity? And doesn't this sound to you
like regular old Christianity, mistrust of the flesh? The devil is identified
with sexual desire or physicality, generally. Manicheanism is very useful
as an explanation of evil. And this may not be something
that keeps you up at night, but it will at some point,
intermittently. Where does evil come from? Why is there so much
evil in the world? Why, if God is good, is there
evil in the world? Sure, some of that may
just be to test you-- you lose your job or your
business fails, but you'll get a better one-- but that's not the same as
horrible infant birth disabilities, or the death of
people by starvation in the thousands, or choose
your evil thing. Why does this happen? One explanation is that
God didn't cause it. There's another god. What's the problem with that? Why is Manicheanism
not a bigger-- I mean, in a way, it is. But you will travel far
to meet anyone who says they're a Manichean. STUDENT: They think God's
not omnipotent. PROFESSOR: Yeah,
first of all, then God's not all powerful, and so
then how is He God? And then instinctively,
what's another problem, maybe, with it? I could say, so what? God is limited. You know, he's trying. Anybody else have a sense of the
moral problem of saying, the devil made me do it? STUDENT: It takes away self-- PROFESSOR: It takes
away individual responsibility. I didn't cheat those
investors. The devil cheated them. I didn't mug that Ezra
Stiles student. The devil did. Anyway, this is a debate. I'm not asking you to take
sides, but notice in the Confessions the attitude of
Augustine towards his Manichean experience. So the fourth century is a
time of ideas circulating around as Christianity starts
to define itself. This would merely be a chapter
of the history of ideas, were it not that the Roman emperors
had to intervene to settle many of these issues. So just forgive me if I am
beating a dead horse, but heresy is important because of
its impact in shaping the church through controversy and
because it fell to the emperor to try to resolve heresy. And thus marks the beginning
of a merger of church and state in a way that would become
characteristic of the entire Middle Ages. The other thing to remark is
that the emperor did not have a lot of success with
this, almost ever. It's very frustrating for an
emperor who can get someone killed immediately. All he's got to do is say,
"You dropped that lark's tongue pie. Take him away and kill him." But
he can't seem to do this with heretics, partly because
heretics love persecution. It just toughens them. So you have the Prefect of
Africa writing to Jones [correction: to Constantine as
you've read in the jones book] and saying that this bishop in
North Africa, Caecilian, has been attacked as a traditor. And Constantine does what
emperors usually do, they appoint local judges
as experts. They say, go and have a hearing
and find out what's going on, and make a
recommendation to me. He makes a recommendation
telling the Donatists to go home and shut up. They don't. They appeal to the emperor. The emperor says, "Go home and
shut up." And they don't. They defy the emperor himself. They go back to North Africa,
and they continue preaching against traitors. Constantine, why does
he intervene? Why didn't he just say,
the hell with you-- pretty literally-- or, it's a matter of opinion,
or, this doesn't get at the core the faith? STUDENT: He's afraid
of upsetting God. PROFESSOR: Yeah. He's afraid of upsetting God. Remember, we said that
Constantine was not much of a philosopher, not much
of a contemplative. He had won a battle with the
favor of the Christian God. Now the Christian God-- he was the companion of
the Christian God. The Christian God has
him by the hand. If the church starts dissolving
into quarreling factions, God is going
to be angry, and his favor will cease. We have to take the ruler's
anxiety about religious unity seriously. So he changes his policy
several times. Remember, we're talking about
a guy who was able to defeat all his military rivals, sent
Licinius running through Asia Minor, caught and
executed him. A man of tremendous
capabilities. Nevertheless, dealing with
these peasants and poor townspeople and, from his point
of view, riff-raff who were strong in North Africa,
he couldn't get them to obey him. Sometimes he tried compromise,
then persecution, then just saying, nobody can
discuss this. And none of this worked. Not only did this not work,
but now Arianism came to preoccupy him. And you can see in his letters,
there's a kind of, "OMG, I didn't realize
what I was signing up for," tone to it. At first he was anti-Arian,
pretty totally. He saw it as a denial
of Christianity. If Christianity by its very name
is that Christ is God, then Arianism would seem to
be antithetical to that fundamental thing. So after defeating Licinius,
he learned more about Arianism, which was strong in
the East, and his first reaction was maybe your
reaction, or certainly the reaction of anybody who's more
interested in power, politics, this world. He considered it over-subtle,
philosophical, and ultimately trivial. But he couldn't get rid of it. He couldn't get rid of it, and
now, instead of appointing judges, he summoned a council of
the bishops of the Empire, what later would be called
an ecumenical council-- "ecumenical" meaning
worldwide-- a universal council, which met
in the city of Nicaea, not right across the Bosphorus,
but more or less-- there's an "a" in there
sometimes-- more or less in the western
part of Asia Minor. And it met in 325. At this first ecumenical
council-- the last ecumenical council of
the Catholic Church, by the way, was in the 1960s, the early
1960s under Pope John-- and this ecumenical council was
summoned by the emperor, and the emperor was in the room
and in certain respects presided, intervened,
took sides. He was very deferential
to the bishops. He is not a bishop, after all. He is not a priest. He does
not have the sacramental orders, but nevertheless, he
was, or attempted to be, the boss of this conference. And it came up with a formula,
a definition of the creed, what every Christian must
believe, saying that God and Christ are of the same essence, but different persons. God and Christ and the Holy
Ghost, who's not really at issue yet-- there will be a heresy involving
the Holy Ghost, but not until the end the course-- they are the same essence,
but different persons. Same essence-- the Greek word is homoousios. Christ was begotten by the
Father, but not made by Him. That's a tough one. That's a tough one. He was begotten by the Father,
but not in time. There wasn't three minutes
after creation. Does someone want to go out and
see what that noise is? Or is it coming from outside,
and we're hopeless? Thank you. Arius gave a kind of equivocal
acceptance of this arrangement, but the Bishop of
Alexandria refused to accept Arius back into communion. In other words, the Nicene Creed
defined orthodoxy, but fighting raged for about 50
years over the relationship between Christ and
God the Father. Constantine kept on
changing his mind. Again, the poor guy
only wanted unity. He wanted this to go away so
that God would favor him. He died more or less an Arian. He came to believe that the
Arian moderate position was the best. This is partly
because of the absolute intransigence of the Bishop
of Alexandria-- the Archbishop of Alexandria,
Athanasius. Athanasius would then later
be a saint, considered the upholder of the orthodox line. So Constantine was baptized
just before he died. In this era, usually, baptism
was supposed to mean that you embraced Christianity totally. It's Augustine, particularly,
who's responsible for infant baptism. Infant baptism then means you
enter the Christian community, but for sure you're
going to sin. The understanding in the 330s
was more, as a baptized Christian, I am no
longer a sinner. So if you were in an office like
Constantine, where you are shedding blood, giving
judgments, leading troops, you would wait until your death-bed
moment before getting baptized. So he would be baptized on his
deathbed by an Arian priest. What's the danger of this,
parenthetically? STUDENT: That you
die unbaptized. PROFESSOR: Die
unbaptized, right. The proverbial bus hitting you
on the street or sudden death of another sort. And we're going to talk-- I'm sure this is going to be
one of the things you will remember with pleasure-- but briefly about sin, why
people sin, and the interaction of good and
evil in human beings. Indeed, we're going to start
very soon, because it's all over the Confessions. Let me give you a little bit
of orientation towards the Confessions, which I hope you
will read as much as possible. Why are we reading this
very personal and autobiographical work? First of all, it is a classic. How many of you, may I ask,
have already read it? A certain number. It is an autobiography, which
makes it very unusual. It's an intimate
autobiography. It's not just highlights of
my career or my resume. He talks about anxieties,
desires, doubts. It is, therefore, a portrait of
the mentality of a thinking person in the ancient world. We get a better idea of the life
of the spirit than from many other, most other, almost
any other source. It shows the fluidity of the
religious scene in the late Roman Empire. His father is a pagan. His mother is a Christian. He is first a Platonist, sort
of, then a Manichean, then a Christian Platonist, and then
a more fervent Christian. So it shows some of the
religious and philosophical options of this era. In doing so, we do come across
important and lasting ideas of the Western tradition about
evil, sin, body, and soul. We also are looking at the
impact of Christianity on the Roman Empire and the
relationship between Christianity and classical
culture. Some things to keep in mind
as you're reading this. The book is uniquely
self-revealing for its time. On the other hand, it doesn't
tell us a lot of stuff we'd like to know. More time is spent going over
a youthful prank involving stealing pears from an orchard
than on Augustine's concubine. Concubine: a woman that you're
not married to who's like a subordinate with whom you
have a sexual relation. And indeed, he would
have a child. Pears, Book II, towards
the end, pay a lot of attention to that. The book has a lot of prayers,
quotations from scripture. It's very Biblically infused. Don't be put off by that,
because the book is a confession. "Confession" has two meanings
in this era. One is its meaning now, the
way we usually use it, confession of sin. But it's also a confession
of praise. I confess God, meaning I
acknowledge God's power, and I praise Him. Finally, I just want to go over
Platonists, because he both admires the Platonists,
feels that they saved him from the Manicheans, but ultimately
comes to doubt them. This is described fairly
well in Brown, beginning on page 73. But let me just take a few
minutes to discuss this. Platonism or Neoplatonism,
it's the same thing. Neoplatonism is a religious
Platonism. It differs from Plato and his
dialogues by being a little bit more mystical in the sense
of focused on the One, trying to apprehend the One, and less
interested in the city, the state, or the kinds of
worldly problems that Plato dealt with. Platonism asserts the
superiority of the spirit and the inferiority of matter. But unlike Manicheanism, which
basically says that matter is evil and spirit is good,
for the Platonists, everything is good. Everything is good, but there
are inferior goods. So matter is not
evil in itself. It's just inferior. Where evil comes from is the
preference of the inferior to the superior, the preference of
the material manifestation to the spiritual. So to take the most famous
example-- because we still have this little funny vestigial
notion of so-called Platonic love-- love of a sexual sort is
not evil in Platonism. What is evil is assuming that
that's all there is and not referring it to a higher
spiritual, nonmaterial kind of love. Wealth is not bad, but the
preference of wealth over spiritual things is bad. Here again, as we spoke at the
beginning of the lecture, it's important to emphasize the
superiority of the spiritual over the material, because
the spiritual is eternal. Evil comes from not realizing
the superiority of the material-- of the spiritual,
excuse me-- or not acting on it, acting
as if the material is all there is. In Platonism, evil is a falling
away, or a turning of your vision, to evoke
the cave metaphor. It is a misperception,
and it's the result of poor education. If you educate people to the
superiority of the spiritual, they will throw off
their evil ways. The reason people misbehave,
kill each other, oppress each other, is that they don't know
any better, and if you teach them, they'll reform. Keep that in mind as we turn to
Augustine and see what he thinks about it. He adores the Platonists because
they're intellectuals. He admires them because they
rescued him from the trap of Manichean dualism-- that is, good versus evil,
just simple forces. Platonism is an explanation of
evil, but for Augustine, it's not a sufficient explanation. And that will form part
of the subject matter of our next talk. So I'll see you on Wednesday. Oh, and Wednesday, you'll get
the paper topics for the first paper, which is due
October 10. Thank you.
